Here's the deal. I have a client for whom I am part time IT manager. They have recently started partnering with 3rd parties to deliver to their clients. One of the first of these partners, a smaller, newer company were already heavy users of Dropbox for Business so my client also invested in the same and together they started sharing data.

At first it wasn't a big deal but my client uses Active Directory & roaming profiles. The amount of data got to the point where it was seriously affecting logon & backup times. I could exclude the Dropbox folder from the roaming profile but then that push the load back onto the internet connection to resync each time they move desk... and they do it frequently enough to be significant.

To add to the mix, they have started using Dropbox to share with other partners and a client, under different dropbox accounts. I'm just waiting for the screams when a file gets put in the wrong folder and shared with the wrong people.

Does anyone know of any auditing tools I could use to get a handle on quite what the users are up to with dropbox?

The other thought I have had is to setup a linux server running the dropbox command line client and use samba, integrated with the AD, to share the files amongst users. That way I can control who gets what through group security and I can block Dropbox access to the workstations, forcing users to tell me about any accounts they need setup. It also gets around any roaming profile & backup issues.

I've built a system to test the idea and it appears to work but I have some reservations about file integrity. The idea of sharing a dropbox folder as a multiuser file share leaves me a little nervous about possible locking & file corruption issues. Has anybody tried anything like this? Any feedback?

15 Replies

I am not sure if the following is an answer to the problems you are having with Dropbox. Have you considered using a product, instead of a public cloud service, to accomplish this? Check SynaMan if you are open to creating your own cloud.

Here is how it works:

You install SynaMan on a file server within your company

When employees are on the same network, they can always map the drives to the file server

Your employees can use its web interface when they are away

You can send Public links to your business partners and outside users to download/upload files to and from your file server.

It looks like your use-case is better suited for a hybrid solution where local users work on local copies of files over Samba, while those files get synced with the cloud. This is what Egnyte's Storage Sync can do for you. Storage Sync app can be installed on your on-premises NAS server and your users authenticated over AD can work on the local copy of the files on the NAS server. These files get bi-directionally synced with the cloud, so that your roaming users can still access those files. You can learn more about Storage Sync over here. Feel free to PM me if you want more information.

Hari, you're absolutely right... I need a hybrid solution. I've looked at your website, and I'll definitely file your product in the list of serious contenders (and the same for Synametrics) when I've got a blank slate. Right now I need a sensible way of managing an arbitrary number of Dropbox accounts, and I didn't see Dropbox as a supported backend for your product. I did only take a flying look so please correct me if I missed it.

Hi Keith! I heard back from support folks and they said that currently, installing Dropbox on either a shared folder or network drive, using redirected folders, and installing Dropbox on roaming profiles are not supported. Since Dropbox installs to the folder path %APPDATA%\Dropbox, roaming profiles will cause Windows to mark the Dropbox database files as offline files, sending them back to the server. When this happens, the files are effectively unavailable, causing the Dropbox client to unlink.

As for the files being put in the wrong folder and shared with the wrong people, you can use sharing audit logs for monitoring and view-only permissions to prevent it. ﻿I hope this helps answer your questions! If not, let me know so I can get more info for you.

1st Post

Kathryn for Dropbox,

This is a copy paste of the answer you gave on Oct 23, 2014, and we told you the KB is from 2006 and useless and this is not working. Your "engineers" %uFEFFhave a very simple task to do, which is to let the user choose where to install Dropbox instead of forcing the %appdata% location.

The only reason this has not been done yet, and the only reason you are still answering with the same copy paste useless answer, is explained in this post by DNF.

"Doctor Mike, Dropbox was designed to behave like a virus by less-than-competent developers, so you shouldn't be surprised at their use of the %appdata% folder for the installation. There could be more virus-like reasons that they chose %appdata% rather than %localappdata%, only to then determine they don't support roaming profiles / folder redirection, but that would be giving them too much credit IMO.

Any legitimate program would install to %programfiles%, but that requires the administrator token and dropbox wants employees to be able to install their software without requiring permission of the IT department (just one reason it's completely blocked in many, many companies). In order to accomplish this, they install the binaries to the users profile folder, and only through sheer incompetence did they manage to install it to the roaming folder instead of local.

This %appdata% issue has been known about by dropbox for a year or more, yet have they made another installer available for businesses? How seriously can you take a company that can't be bothered to create a separate installer, e.g. dropboxforbusiness.exe, to support their "for business" service? I had given up on dropbox and started trialing box.net, which is designed from the ground up for businesses, when they finally resolved the issues we were having by using an older version of the installer with some other hacks to get it running. Now even that doesn't work, and after hours upon hours on the phone and back and forth emails with support showing no results (new users can't connect after successfully signing in - for random users), and I'm looking at box.net again.

I have no further interest in supporting a company that devotes their engineering resources on making their product as viral as possible and none on getting it to actually work in a business environment. I refuse to continue paying thousands per year for an occasionally-functional product that could be fixed in 1 minute if anyone there was even remotely concerned about the product itself instead how well it can "spread". "%uFEFF

Hi Gabriel, I am very sorry for your frustrations with Dropbox. I have passed on your feedback (and the feedback from the other thread) to the product management team so they can try to incorporate some improvements into their road map. I spoke with some more people about this issue and was told that the use of Windows Roaming user profiles in many enterprises has been deprecated in favor of folder redirection to achieve centralization of the contents of user folders including Desktops, My Documents, etc. With the use of Dropbox, most if not all of these methods from Roaming User Profiles through Folder Redirection are not necessary.﻿ However, I know that many SpiceHeads really want this feature, so like I mentioned before, I have passed on your suggestions. I will keep you posted should things change and if you have any more questions or concerns, never hesitate to shoot me a PM.

If you still have those same headaches, another solution might be SmartFile. We have an easy to use application that can deliver a lot of the same functionality of Dropbox, but with additional auditing tools, multi-user file/folder shares, user access and permissions, and secure FTP connectivity. We can integrate with AD as well, so it could help your situation all together. Let me know if you would like a quick demo or a trial.

Hi thelectronichild! We do currently support Roaming Profiles in that you'll be able to run Dropbox on devices that have roaming profiles configurations. To get that, you need to do a fresh manual install of the Dropbox desktop application using version 3.6.X or above; updating an older version of the application or letting the application auto-update to these newer versions will not work for roaming profiles. Not sure if this is what you were asking, but I should note that we don't provide support for allowing users to roam their Dropbox configuration or database files across computers. Let me know if you have any questions!﻿﻿

Hari, you're absolutely right... I need a hybrid solution. I've looked at your website, and I'll definitely file your product in the list of serious contenders (and the same for Synametrics) when I've got a blank slate. Right now I need a sensible way of managing an arbitrary number of Dropbox accounts, and I didn't see Dropbox as a supported backend for your product. I did only take a flying look so please correct me if I missed it.

As you mentioned hybrid and a need for Dropbox integration, I wanted to add one more green guy suggestion to your list :) ownCloud would allow you to implement in a hybrid environment and does integrate with Dropbox, AD as well as a bunch of other integrations. You could run it on your Linux server and maintain the group controls you suggested. You could also provide anonymous (or account-based) upload files for external folks and selective sync means that the folders/files to be synced down to the desktop can be selected and size thresholds set which prompts the user whether they want to sync the larger files or not.

a local user account on the Centos server for each dropbox account and configuring each dropbox top level folder as a share

installing dropbox via the command line as per dropbox' own instructions, and using dropbox.py to start/stop/monitor

... and it all seems to be working happily. Logon issues have disappeared as it no longer has to take account of gigabytes of DB files (the largest had grown to 53GB of shared files).

Users get to use the files just as they would any other local server based share. They still need to use the web interface to manage sharing with 3rd parties.

The other benefit is that users can happily use multiple dropbox accounts/shares. The individual DB accounts were being used more as a per-project resource that a per-user. This led to a few users having to switch between DB accounts if when switching projects, creating even more uncertainty.

Kelly - thanks for the ownCloud suggestion. I'm using it already in this client as a gateway to present file shares to users for remote working, fully integrated with the Samba4 domain for permissions. I did consider using it to front the DropBox accounts but didn't see any advantage in doing so. Correct me if I'm wrong but ownCloud doesn't appear to provide a LAN type file sharing protocol (like SMB) - WebDAV is a poor substitute in a LAN environment.

yup...def missed the date on this one. But, happy to share a bit on your question...the ownCloud server can communicate directly with SMB but the user experience is via WebDAV unless you choose to use the ownCloud desktop client (which obfuscates WebDAV and creates a traditional sync experience).

We use Dropbox for business and it fits our needs well. We do not have roaming profiles, so I don't have that issue. However, it occurred to me if you do not use the local client and just use the web interface, you would not have the local files downloading every time somebody logs in. Just drive them to the Dropbox portal for everything. For what it is worth.

Allen

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